Belo: From Newspapers to New Media

Chapter 5. A NEW ERA DAWNS (1965–1972)

Chapter 5 ANEWERADAWNS 1965–1972 The year 1965 might be considered the year that most everything began to speed up, and the media business was at the forefront of changes worldwide.The world, in general, had begun to seem smaller, as technological advances made communications more immediate,no matter the distance.Newspaper editors and television news directors experienced the phenomenon every day, when there was more available news to report than ever before, and not enough space or time to report it. At Belo in particular, 1965 was the year thatWFAA-TV converted to all-color transmissions, donating its old cameras to public television station KERA-TV, which occupied WFAA’s original headquarters building .The Dallas Morning News installed its first computer systems that year, beginning with payroll administration and classified advertising.The Dallas Morning News Building had been planned with extra space to be finished out only when it was needed.That year,another 60,000 square feet was finished to accommodate the growing newspaper operations.Among other needs, room was needed for the mainframe computer and the new department called data processing,which had been created to service and to build on the new computer systems. In early 1966, Joe Dealey made especially prescient, almost fearful, comments to the Belo stockholders about the coming electronic revolution . He said, “The computer alone with its swift and silent magic has only just begun to revitalize this business and our industry.The potentials inherent in this type of technological sophistication stagger some and will cause us all to take fresh and thoughtful looks at the processes which, until now, have served us well.” He further alluded to the effect that everyone feared computers would have in displacing employees, saying “. . . approaches [to retraining and reassigning employees] must be perfected with equity to all . . .”1 In midyear he commented to the Belo directors that “the pace of our business has undoubtedly accelerated and accelerated greatly. . . . [I]t is certainly not the same leisurely affair it might have been twenty years ago.”2 Of course,those who were in charge in 1946,when Joe came back fromWorldWar II,probably didn’t consider their workdays all that leisurely, but the company was certainly experiencing unprecedented change in the mid-sixties. Dallas was changing too, as it continued to reel from the worldwide perception that it was a city of hate that somehow had contributed to the assassination of President Kennedy. Under the influence of Ted Dealey, the News had supported Dallas’s ultraconservative U.S. congressman BruceAlger since 1956.However,in 1964,withTed’s voice muffled somewhat , the News shifted its editorial support to Alger’s opponent, Dallas mayor Earle Cabell, who had been recruited to run for Congress by city leaders striving to project a more moderate image of the city. Cabell easily won the election, in part because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had energized the electorate in the still-segregated black neighborhoods of the city.3 Cabell had resigned his seat as mayor in order to run for Congress,and he was replaced as mayor by J. Erik Jonsson, who in December of 1965 launched a program to engage the citizens of Dallas in a series of discussions about the future of the city. His program was called “Goals for Dallas ,”and it included residents from throughout the city neighborhoods in discussions and planning for the future.Goals for Dallas has been credited as an important factor in Dallas’s relative stability during the volatile decade beginning in 1964, while other cities around the country experienced much greater turmoil.4 Dallas and Belo did not escape the protests and counter-protests of those years, however. Among other incidents during 1965, civil rights marchers gathered at Ferris Plaza across the street from the Belo companies to protest racial inequities in all Dallas institutions; on another occasion ,the American Nazi Party rallied in the same location,trying to keep everything as it was.Three bomb threats were called in to the News in the 126 A New Era Dawns fall of that year,presumably reacting to news coverage of the national civil rights movement.A heightened sense of Belo’s vulnerability led management to install much tighter security around the offices and printing plant.5 In 1966, Joe took on a highly visible role in the community when he volunteered to chair the annual United Fund Campaign. His leadership that year...